Archive for European Astronomical Society

Tuesday at #EAS2025

Posted in Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , on June 24, 2025 by telescoper

Today was my first day at EAS 2025 on the nice campus of University College Cork. I managed to register before the first session and found my way around what is clearly a very well organised meeting. They have a very useful app to help attendees navigate both space and time.

I spent a large part of today at a session about the future of scientific publishing,  which was split in two, either side of the morning’s plenary. The first half started with a talk by Selina La Barbera, a representative of EDP Sciences, the publisher of the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics:

It also featured a talk by João Alves, Letters Editor of Astronomy and Astrophysics, and Uta Grothkopf, librarian of the European Southern Observatory. The last talk was full of insights and information. The Q&A was very lively. I was expecting that I might be the one to inject some controversy into the discussion, but I didn’t need to. Issues about the cost of APCs, etc, were raised by others before I got the chance.

Before the plenary, there was time for a group photograph of staff and students from Maynooth:

The Maynooth Contingent

The highlight of the plenary was seeing Licia Verde collect the Jocelyn Bell Burnell Medal on behalf of arXiv, together with Ralph Wijers. They both gave interesting presentations about arXiv too.

Licia, with the EAS Medal she received today.

Back in the special session about publishing, I participated in a panel discussion, which was very lively. On a Zoom  call last week in preparation for this, we were a bit worried that not many people would take part, but in the event the room was full and many people asked questions, including many about OJAp, and the discussion went on outside after the session was finished.  I think it was a very successful session.

Now that the session I was directly involved in is over, I can relax a bit and be free tomorrow to  attend more science sessions, including a couple about Euclid…

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EAS 2025 in Cork

Posted in Biographical, Open Access with tags , , , , on June 22, 2025 by telescoper

Tomorrow I’ll be travelling to the fine city of Cork, where I shall be for most of next week, attending the 2025 Annual Meeting of the European Astronomical Society I was planing to travel today, but I have some things to attend to at home tomorrow morning so I won’t get to Cork until late afternoon.

The EAS Annual Meeting is a very large meeting with well over a thousand participants expected. It is held each year in a different European city but, according to tradition, never a capital. Last year it was in Padova (Italy) and the year before that in Kraków (Poland).

I usually enjoy smaller-scale meetings and workshops over these mega-conferences, but I’m looking forward to this one. There will be a strong Maynooth contingent there but I also hope to see some old friends from elsewhere, as well as catching up on some exciting science results.

Talking of science, I am on the Scientific Organizing Committee for this meeting. The programme is very large and diverse and there were a few headaches on the way, but nothing compared to the logistical challenges facing the local organizers; they will probably reach peak stress levels ahead of the opening of the meeting, but I’m sure everything will go well. The Irish National Astronomy Meeting (INAM) was actually held in Cork in 2023. Although a much smaller meeting than EAS, the experience of running that will probably have helped the organizers.

I’m not actually giving a talk at EAS but I will be participating in a panel discussion in a special session on The Future of Scientific Publishing: Strategies and Challenges for Astronomy on Tuesday 24th June. When I saw the initial announcement for this special session, I was was concerned that it would be entirely dominated by representatives of the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics and their publisher EDP Sciences. The first session (9.00 to 10.30) titled “SCIENCE PUBLISHING TODAY AND TOMORROW” is still like that, but the panel discussion in the second session (13.15 to 14.45) “SCIENCE PUBLISHING: A COMMUNITY’S VIEW” is a bit more balanced than that, with a representatives of NASA/ADS and the European Southern Observatory (among others). If I’m given an opportunity to get a word in, I’ll be arguing that traditional journals are unnecessary and obsolete.

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Kudos to arXiv!

Posted in Open Access with tags , , , on March 28, 2025 by telescoper

There’s a good piece in Wired about Paul Ginsparg, the physicist who created arXiv. The lede of the article begins Modern science wouldn’t exist without the online research repository known as arXiv. For once, this isn’t an exaggeration. I recommend you read the piece yourself so I won’t say much more about it except that I found it fascinating. I couldn’t resist in including this extract, however, with which I wholeheartedly agree:

Every industry has certain problems universally acknowledged as broken: insurance in health care, licensing in music, standardized testing in education, tipping in the restaurant business. In academia, it’s publishing. Academic publishing is dominated by for-profit giants like Elsevier and Springer. Calling their practice a form of thuggery isn’t so much an insult as an economic observation. Imagine if a book publisher demanded that authors write books for free and, instead of employing in-house editors, relied on other authors to edit those books, also for free. And not only that: The final product was then sold at prohibitively expensive prices to ordinary readers, and institutions were forced to pay exorbitant fees for access.

I’ve written words to that effect so many times I’ve lost count!

Anyway, as if to reinforce the point about the transformative nature of arXiv, it has just been announced that the European Astronomical Society has awarded the 2025 Jocelyn Bell Burnell Inspiration Medal to arXiv “for its impact on astrophysical research thanks to the open, free and world-wide distribution of scientific articles”. What a bold, imaginative and fully justifiable decision that is, and congratulations to arXiv! It is a truth universally acknowledged that every paper in astrophysics worth reading is on arXiv.

I’m planning to be at this year’s EAS meeting in Cork at the end of June when this, and the other EAS awards, will be presented. I’m not sure who will receive it on behalf of arXiv but they’re sure to get a rousing ovation.

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2025: The Year Ahead

Posted in Biographical, Euclid, Maynooth with tags , , , , on January 1, 2025 by telescoper 
For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice.
And to make an end is to make a beginning.

From Four Quartets, ‘Little Gidding’ by T. S. Eliot.

January is named after the Roman deity Janus, who according to Wikipedia, is the god of beginnings, gates, transitions, time, duality, doorways, passages, frames, and endings. Since I did a retrospective post yesterday about 2024 in retrospect, I thought I’d do a quick one today (1st January 2025) to mention a few things looking forward.

January will, as usual, be dominated by examinations, and especially the marking thereof. The first examination for which I am responsible is on January 13th.

February sees the start of a new semester. I’ll be teaching Particle Physics for the first time at Maynooth. I taught this subject for many years at Nottingham and Cardiff (the latter combined with Nuclear Physics), so it should be OK. My other module is Computational Physics which I have taught at Maynooth every year since 2018, apart from 2024 when I was on sabbatical.

The big event in March will be the release of “Q1” data from Euclid. This is only a very small part of the full survey, but is an important milestone and will no doubt attract a lot of press coverage. There’s a blog post by Knud Jahnke here. No doubt I’ll do a few blog posts too. The first full data release DR1 will take place in 2026. The Q1 release is timed to coincide with the annual Euclid Consortium Meeting, which this year takes place in Leiden. I won’t be able to attend in person, as it happens during teaching term, but may be able to follow some of the sessions remotely.

In April we will have a very special visitor to Maynooth to deliver the Dean’s Lecture (of which more anon). Much less significantly, I’ll be giving a Colloquium in the Department of Physics.

May will largely be taken up with second semester exams and assessments – there will be a lot of computational physics projects to correct as well as the usual examinations.

The annual meeting of the European Astronomical Society takes place in Cork in June. I’ve been to Cork before, but am looking forward to going again.

And then it will be summer. I did a lot of travelling during my sabbatical so I am not planning to travel much in 2025, though I may try to visit some more places in Ireland. Hopefully I’ll be able to get on with some research too. This year I am supervising my first MSc project at Maynooth, so that will be an interesting new experience.

And then we’re more-or-less into the next academic year 25/26. That’s beyond my planning horizon. I don’t know what I’ll be teaching, but it may be the same as 2024 (at least for Semester 1). I wonder if I’ll get to teach any astrophysics or cosmology here before I retire? It doesn’t look likely…

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